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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24791794">never let me go</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie'>atiredonnie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Polyamory, brief background dedue/mercedes, i love!!!! the golden deer!!!, no beta we die like Glenn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:28:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Underage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>7,296</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24791794</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Let no one say Hilda’s not a wellspring of fantastic ideas.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hilda Valentine Goneril/Claude von Riegan, Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan, Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan/Hilda Valentine Goneril, Marianne von Edmund/Hilda Valentine Goneril</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>never let me go</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>okay so basically. i love the golden deer. i love them so much. so i wrote a fic where my favorite favorite golden deer all fall in love because i am very powerful. this is all sap because i say so. no beta lol</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was a golden September morning, all picture perfect and autumn breeze, when Hilda Valentine Goneril had her grand idea, a notion so explosive that even the afterimage of it made her brain fizzle like someone had poured pop rocks in her skill and dosed them with brine. </p><p>It was a golden September morning when The Grand Idea made itself known and Hilda yelped, shooting up from the grass making a noise very similar to that of a kettle full of boiling water. Next to her, her best friend and confidant Claude von Riegan wrenched himself up for the earth and made a similar sort of noise, this time out of surprise. </p><p>Claude and Hilda were no strangers to great ideas and expansive notions that often made themselves reality. In fact, just at that moment, the both of them were indulging in their second best notion, the act of Shameless Truancy. (Claude had argued in the past in favor of the elevation of Shameless Truancy from second best notion to first best notion. Hilda vehemently opposed his petitioning every time he brought it up, on the grounds that number one, Doing Absolutely Fucking Nothing, was far too sacred to knock down a peg. Eventually, Claude acquiesced, stating that Doing Absolutely Fucking Nothing was pretty sacred and often accompanied Shameless Truancy anyways. He was right on both counts.) But generally the arrival of said great ideas weren’t preceded by a shrill cast-iron shriek, so one couldn’t blame Claude for being surprised.</p><p>It was a golden September morning. Claude and Hilda were making a grand show of skipping Physical Education to go lay in the grass and do nothing, and in the process of doing nothing Hilda had her best idea yet. </p><p>“What was that.” Claude said flatly, without even bothering to phrase his statement with a questioning uptick. “A noise I made.” Hilda responded dazedly, which was of course correct but not quite the answer Claude was looking for. “Okay.” Claude said shortly, twirling a decapitated dandelion head between two brown fingers. “And, out of pure curiosity, why did you make that noise?” Hilda’s eyes brightened, face bathed in warm amber light. “Because,” she intoned, hands digging in the soil. “I had an idea.” Claude quirked an eyebrow. A silent invitation. Elaborate. </p><p>“We’re best friends.” Hilda said simply. A statement of fact. Claude didn’t bother to disagree, because, you know, it was true. They both had other friends, of course, slightly more comfortable and comforting friends due to their comparative inability to spout and spot bullshit, but Hilda and Claude always ended up gravitating towards each other the most. Call it magnetism. Hilda continued. “And because we’re best friends, that means we like each other a lot. We vibe together, you know?” Claude nodded in assent. Hilda leaned backwards, arms taut against the ground, enormous pink pigtails trailing behind her like twin bubblegum snakes. “And,” she stated, “we’re both really hot. Like, drop-dead gorgeous. Stunners, the two of us.” Claude grinned at that, mockingly twirling his braid in the fashion of a smitten schoolgirl. “Oh stop,” he teased, catlike smile spread across his face. “You’ll make me blush.” Wisely, Hilda ignored him. “So,” she said deeply, as if the Greater Point was approaching over the hill, the conclusion in glorious sight, “if we’re friends who like each other an awful lot, and we’re both objectively sexy as hell, then why aren’t we sleeping together?” </p><p>She delivered the last point with a grand extension of her arms, fingertips reaching proudly towards the air, more alive and actually invested than Claude had seen her in at least a week when their server at Outback Steakhouse slipped a receipt scrawled with her number out from between her tits and delivered it right into Hilda’s own bosom, a come-on that Hilda declares immediately after that she wanted inscribed on her gravestone. And then Claude was thinking about her boobs, which given that she had just proposed a torrid friend-affair seemed like a good way to kick off their interactions from that point forward. And then Claude’s brain finally caught up to the reality of the proposition and he choked on thin air, wheezing desperately as scraps of pure disbelief and more than a few dandelion seeds lodged themselves into his lungs. Hilda looked down at him expectantly, arms still extended.</p><p>“That’s-“ Claude managed, still hacking up air and the taste of autumn, “-uh. Blunt.”</p><p>Hilda quirked an eyebrow. “But you’re not opposed?” She said, question more rhetorical than anything, because Hilda knew Claude, and Claude knew Hilda, much better and soon more intimately than even 9th graders knew the best urinals for cherry bombs. Hilda knew Claude and she knew, more than anything, that he wouldn’t say no to his best friend and probably-favorite-person offering him her great rack. It was the exact sort of inevitably messy and complicated endeavor that he strove for. </p><p>“Okay.” Claude said. “Okay, Okay. Okay. Let’s clarify.” </p><p>Hilda plopped down on the ground, deeply satisfied, proposal now announced and answer expectantly awaited. “Clarify what?” Claude coughed. Above them, the sun wavered lazily in the sky. Even the regular chorus of screaming cicadas had let up, apparently then more concerned with friend sex politics than their usual dramatic howl symphony. “Is this like. A friends with benefits situation? Or are you suggesting we actually date? Because our compatibility and, you know, general affection for each other wouldn’t matter in the first case. But also it’s you. I don’t even know if long-term is a thing you think you’re capable of doing, babe.” Hilda blinked slowly, carefully, and then pointed, carefully painted index finger jabbing right around Claude’s forehead. “See! There, right there. Most of the time this would be more of a fuckbuddies situation, but like, we already act like a couple most of the time anyways, stupid pet names and calling each other pretty and all. Commitment is weird and stuff, but I would genuinely like to date you. You’re cool and stuff and you make me laugh and you know how to apply nail polish. Also, you’re really hot. So yeah. We should date.” Hilda leaned back at the end of her proclamation, arms folded behind her head, gaze focused on the cornflower sky. </p><p>Claude bit his lip and turned his eyes upwards too. Clawing for something. Actually thinking it over, which wasn’t something about himself he necessarily wanted people to grasp - that he thought about big decisions like some kind of chump - but he couldn’t hide that shit from Hilda. Never could. </p><p>The simple fact that he couldn’t actually hide that shit from Hilda was what tipped the scales, in the end. Claude exhaled slowly. “Okay, yeah. We should date.” Hilda smiled. Held out one hand, a bit green with grass stain but with noticeably unblemished daggerlike nails. Almost instinctively, Claude reached out to shake, only to yelp like a kicked puppy when Hilda bit into him with said knife nails. She laughed out, then, as he hissed furiously, one sharp, unladylike peal, eyes screwed shut and skirt hiked up her bare legs. Claude felt something in his ribcage twist. So did Hilda, but that was because of wheezing laughter. </p><p>“Oh man, that never fails. What are you, Pavlovian trained into grabbing every hand that reaches out to you? That’s definitely going to kill you someday. </p><p>“That’s not how Pavlov works. And I seriously doubt my death will be via handshake. It’ll be much more stupid, much more cool, and much more my fault, whatever it is.”</p><p>“Smartass.”</p><p>“Dumbass.”</p><p>They stuck out their tongues at each other in perfect unison, squinting in the September sky. Young love is like that. Idiotic. </p><p>“I’m going to kiss you now,” Hilda said plainly, already leaning forwards on the earth, nearly crushing a caterpillar as she bulldozed towards her target. Claude tried to think of something smart to say in response, but her mouth was too fast. </p><p>It was… nice. Gentler than Claude expected, the pressure of her mouth on his. She tasted like cinnamon lip gloss and Claude didn’t really know how he felt about that, but he was absolutely and positively certain that he did like the base feeling of it, the warm push and pull of her lips and teeth and tongue. Hilda wasn’t used to taking the lead, but she was enjoying it too, the bunching of his shirt up in her fists like an anchor to the earth, the flutter of his eyelashes brushing against her cheek. It was so fun, she decided suddenly, knees knocking clumsily against the dirt, that she was going to tilt her head like - that, yes, just like that, and Claude made a little noise in her mouth and something deep inside her stomach melted at the sound.</p><p>They broke away. </p><p>“Dope.” Hilda said, looking far too dazed from the experience than she probably had a right to be, given the amount of people she had kissed and been kissed by before. Claude, meanwhile, was much too smug for a boy that in spite of being a verifiable Hot Item, had only made out with 2 girls and 1 guy before, who were, in order, his former math tutor, the president of the debate team, and a guy he had only known from various glimpses of him in their shared therapist’s waiting room before running into him drunk as a skunk and attempting to cut out his eye in the bathroom during a frat party. And that wasn’t even breaching sex, which Hilda had done but never quite enjoyed, and which Claude hadn’t done but had approached very rapidly at one point before Therapist Waiting Room Guy broke down halfway through unbuttoning his pants. </p><p>Claude nodded. “Dope.” </p><p>And that was that. </p><p>And it was funny, the way it all worked, because Hilda has latched on to something rather important and rather true when she announced that they already acted like a couple most of the time. Because they did. And because Claude and Hilda were both relatively Hot Shit, that hadn’t gone unnoticed. No one reacted wildly, with the sort of outrageous swearing and fumbling that the best sorts of dating announcements always invoke when Claude kissed Hilda on the lips before heading to third period the next day in broad daylight, observed by half the student body, because said half was already pretty certain they were dating anyway, which was a reasonable assumption to make, one so intimately pressed flush up against the truth that clearing up the misunderstanding was pointless. Because was it really a misunderstanding when the pet names remained the same, the flights of Capital T Truancy and weird science experiments in the biology lab after school remained the same, the casual affection and constant contact from linked hands to harassed pigtails remained the same? Hilda and Claude reasoned that it wasn’t, and thus didn’t bother to clear it up. </p><p>So most stuff didn’t change. </p><p>But the stuff that did was very much notable and very much the only fucking thing the two were capable of thinking about anymore. </p><p>Namely: Intimacy. Capital I this time. </p><p>It was really, really good. </p><p>Making out in the gym was good. Making out in the closets was good. Making out beneath the bleachers was good. Making out against the lockers after school, basking in afternoon light, was good. When Hilda ditched the cinnamon lipgloss it got even better, Claude thought privately. Because really, when you removed unfortunate variables like that, stripped away the circumstance or timing or any peripheral factors only one unarguable fact remained, naked and proud, bare and deeply obvious. </p><p>Claude and Hilda were really, really good at kissing. And even better at kissing each other. </p><p>They were really good at kissing in unorthodox places, in a number of ways. At one point Hilda exhaled into Claude’s mouth, pressed between her locker and Claude’s body like an excessively pink sandwich, bodily lifted herself up off the ground, swung her legs around Claude’s torso like it was the easiest fucking thing in the world and went right back at it. Claude, privately deeply impressed and envious of that move, resolved to get her back and did so by hanging upside-down from a stairwell to kiss her until she went blue in the face. Suck it, Spider-Man. </p><p>They were not only really good at kissing in unusual places in unusual fashions, but also really good at not letting it be fucking boring. There was never any monotony to the process, never any obligation. Just the soft, wet heat of lips on lips and eventually skin and throat and entire shining face until suddenly they were laughing, foreheads tipped against each other, noses touching, laughing like the end of the fucking world couldn’t come soon enough. It always escalated like that. First mouth on mouth and then mouth everywhere and then delirious laughter, a sort of heavy, everywhere happiness, in the grasping of cloth and the scrambling for air, lovely and tawny and bright. </p><p>And of course, when escalation is brought up, thus is the existence of intimacy that runs deeper than kissing. That is how it works, after all. </p><p>The first time Hilda took off Claude’s pants, the two alone in her room, a room swaddled with pink and tongue-in-cheek girlishness but a room that didn’t contain anyone but Hilda and Claude and thus a sacred room regardless - the first time she took off his pants, she laughed. </p><p>Claude’s mouth widened then, into an outraged and nigh-perfect oval, which only made her laugh harder, silhouetted with sunshine and peach curtains, undone at the sight of him, albeit not in the way he would’ve liked.</p><p>“Wow, way to break the news, doctor.” Claude grouched. “Is this how you act towards everyone, or is my wong particularly pathetic? Do I need to be prescribed something?” Hilda laughed once more, short and sharp, nearly crying, and straightened herself up neatly. “It’s not small, you big baby.” She said, voice still hitching with suppressed giggles. “It’s just - you looked so expectant. Like you were really waiting for some kind of analytical judgement. Is that what you want, Claude, for me to rate your dick?” She questioned before immediately leaning over again, her body folded in half like a clothespin. “Great dirty talk, babe.” He said flatly, corner of his mouth twitching frantically. “Just spectacular. Come here.” </p><p>He held open his arms, a silent invitation. She obliged. </p><p>The first time was - well. It was the first time. It was supposed to be a bit awkward, but they pretty soon realized that just like making out, they were pretty good at sex too. There was fumbling, in the beginning, jackets with too many buttons and deeply complicated bra straps, Hilda fiddling with the lights, Claude fiddling with the fan, the two just fiddling in general, touching and prodding with hunger and fear and happy excitement, more mouths of course (as everything is unquestionably better with mouths), but also fingers and thighs and nails and knuckles and everything in between, Claude swearing and Hilda laughing and Claude laughing and Hilda swearing and Claude saying that it wasn’t anything like porn and Hilda saying that yeah, it was better, because you weren’t alone and miserable, and Hilda falling asleep immediately afterwards, and Claude looking at her wide expanse of skin and her scrunched-shut eyes and her unladylike snores, and Claude saying, with an air of almost wonder, that she was so so beautiful and so so good and that he loved her, like for real for real. And Hilda opening one eye as he babbled and pressing her thumb against his open lips and telling him that he was the prettiest man she had ever seen and if he laughed at that she’d hit him and that she loved him too.</p><p>And it was really fucking good. And it kept being fucking good, emphasis on the fucking, and it kept getting better. </p><p>But here’s the thing about relationships: at some point in the eyes of the many you cease to become all that distinct as entities in ways that actually matter.</p><p>Case in point: Claude and Hilda, when in vicinity of each other, were no longer Claude and Hilda. They were Claude-and-Hilda, and that difference was important. </p><p>What that meant was, of course, that other friends tended not to come along to Claude-and-Hilda things, which meant they came along to everything less in general. And anything even resembling a tight-knit circle began to come undone at the seams. It helped that Claude and Hilda were already sort of a monolith before, a mutant double nut that no one really wanted to crack, existing on the periphery of the group even before the Golden September Morning, also known as Day 1. But the real, legitimate codification of their relationship as a thing that mattered and something that would define them kind of erased any possibility of the two of them eventually sinking into the clusterfuck that was Sylvain and Ingrid and Felix and Dimitri, for example, or the impenetrable brick fortress that was Edelgard and Hubert. There just wasn’t any room. And that was fine. There doesn’t always need to be space, after all. Sometimes one can shut the gate.</p><p>And then.</p><p>And then.</p><p>It was a white March morning, all dripping and new buds and melting snow, when everything changed, irreversibly, and completely. It was a white March morning and the cicadas were sleeping in the earth. It was a white March morning and it begun when Hanneman introduced their brand new student who they should all treat with FRIENDLINESS and RESPECT. And her name was Marianne Von Edmund and she had feathers in her Clorox-blue hair and sparkling shoes like something out of a Disney movie and Hilda and Claude both thought, Shit. </p><p>Capital S. It was that bad. </p><p>Hilda watched Marianne from the corner. She didn’t mean to, she reasoned, but she was just bored and there was nothing better to do and - well. Hilda ditched that excuse as soon as possible because really, who did she even have to justify herself to, and to be fair she was actually bored out of her goddamn mind. It was just that also. Marianne had giant gray eyes and enormous bruises under them like smears of angry violet paint and she smelled like live fucking chicken and Hilda was a taken woman but there was nothing wrong with looking. Especially not at a girl like that with those pink pink lips and those choppy stormy bangs. Hilda could look. And she did. She looked and looked and looked until the bell rung and Marianne leapt up like a startled rabbit to run out the door and the whole time she was looking something inside her began to fill up, a pitcher of warm water and sunlight and the exact same happiness Hilda found in Claude’s perfect mouth every day and Hilda upgraded her Capital S Shit to a Capital F Fuck.</p><p>Claude, meanwhile, was not looking. Claude was not looking because he was fairly certain that if he looked he would not be able to stop looking. There was something deep and ravenous there, something heavy and old and cold in those giant ashen eyes, a hunger unbefitting of a girl who shook like antique china during an earthquake, and Claude knew that if he looked up he would quite simply not look down again. Call it a gravitational force. So he didn’t look. He looked down, almost stubbornly and triumphantly, and then she passed right in front of his fucking desk on her way out and he spilled an entire bottle of ink on his hand. </p><p>Fuck. </p><p>Marianne was not in their next class, but the class after that was lunch and as the two of them headed out to the courtyard they saw a girl in a peasant dress with blue hair that smelled of a menagerie sitting alone on a bench. And Claude looked at Hilda. And Hilda looked at Claude. And Hilda said “Come on. We have to. She’s like a Disney princess, for fuck’s sake.” </p><p>“Well.” Claude said dryly, throat rubbed sandpaper-raw. “When you put it that way.” </p><p>Carefully, so not to spook her, they approached. </p><p>Marianne sat and ate her small salad. Her plastic fork banged up against a singular cherry tomato in a sea of lettuce. She breathed out, a single shuddering noise, a pinball machine sound in her lungs. “Why are you here.”</p><p>Hilda looked at Claude. Claude looked at Hilda. </p><p>Claude spoke first. “That bench is a haven of bird poop. Let us show you better places to eat.” Hilda nodded in assent. Marianne hesitated, before thrusting her one and only cherry tomato into her mouth with surprising violence. “Thank you for the offer.” She said quietly, voice wavering as if she was about to burst into tears. (She was.) “But, uh. It’s fine. I like birds.” Claude raised an eyebrow. Then he put it back down. It felt wrong, almost, for the situation at hand. The conversation was the equivalent of navigating a minefield while balancing a platter of active grenades on your head like appetizers, and the eyebrow, Claude decided, had no place in it. “Everyone likes birds. Myself included. But I don’t think anyone, including you, likes bird feces. You’d have to be one hell of a Doolittle to tolerate that.” Marianne’s mouth twisted unhappily like a silly straw, fingers trembling, vicelike, around her plastic straw. “I-“ she said, voice breaking. “Please. Just go.”</p><p>Enter Hilda.</p><p>“No.” She said flatly, hands on hips. Surprised, Marianne finally looked up. Hilda and Claude felt identical flickers of electricity in their abdomens, which they were entirely justified in feeling, as even from an unbiased perspective Marianne’s eyes could have induced cardiac arrest in anyone. Hilda had a point to make, however, so she stood tall in spite of those goddamn eyes, lip extended in a perfect pink pout, crisp spring air invoking goosebumps in her skin that she stubbornly ignored. “You’re miserable. Obviously. That doesn’t mean you want anything to do with us, of course, but. One lunch. For one lunch please sit with us and laugh at our jokes and if you don’t enjoy yourself you can go back to your bench of bird shit but for your first and thus most important lunch, please. Sit with us.”</p><p>Stillness. Silence. Claude chewed on the inside of his mouth. Marianne gazed up, mouth slightly parted, unshed tears still wobbling in her eyes. Somewhere in the distance, a bunch of sophomores began dancing for no good reason. </p><p>“Okay.” Marianne said shallowly, and stood up.</p><p>Claude and Hilda ate in the grass, by the shade of a gigantic cedar tree. They used to eat at the Outback Steakhouse at lunchtime, less for the food than for the waiter who slipped her number in between Hilda’s tits that one time, but they quit when she did. Which was fine, because Hilda got food poisoning and Claude had to hold her hair back over the toilet like five times while she cried and vomited, sweat plastering her hair to her skin, surrounded by unfriendly graffiti as she confessed sin after uncommitted sin while beef returned to the sewers. The two plopped down on the ground easily, avoiding a persistent anthill and larger patches of mud, and without preamble began to pull out The Leftovers. Capital The, capital Leftovers, because like with anything capitalized, these Leftovers were special. Rice and chicken and corn and beans all squished together and slathered in guacamole, pork skewers falling off rotting sticks and egg salad with crinkled leaves and congealing mayonnaise. At some point they all began to blur together, and thus a tradition had begun. Every day Claude and Hilda collected more scraps from their respective houses, cobbled them together in a Frankensteinen display of unholy alchemy and ate unquestioningly and without shame, reaching across to grab at what was essentially the same meal split across two bags. That day there was the ever present guacamole, an essential ingredient in every single leftover lunch, as well as severed crabs legs, cuts of smoked tuna, what looked like soggy goldfish, potatoes, and lettuce leaves. Not the best selection. But that wasn’t the point. </p><p>Hilda and Claude ate. Marianne stared. </p><p>“So, Marianne,” Hilda said cheerfully after swallowing a mouthful of crab, “Where are you from?” </p><p>“Um.” Marianne said. “Can you ask a different question please?”</p><p>“Alright.” Hilda said, unbothered. “Do you own, like, a farm?” Marianne’s face brightened, almost comically so, as if her pores were full of lightbulbs that had all switched on. “Yes! I don’t have, um, a favorite animal though. People always ask what my favorite animal is, and I never say, because it doesn’t feel fair. They’re all. Um. They’re all doing their best, I think. I’m sorry if that’s weird.”</p><p>“Not at all.” Claude interjected. “They’re certainly doing better than me.” “No, they’re not.” Marianne says with a frown. “You’re doing. Pretty good I think. Sorry.” </p><p>“Stop saying sorry so much. You’ve only ever said cute things, so don’t apologize for them.”</p><p>“Sorry! Sorry.”</p><p>“Seriously! What did I just say!”</p><p>The next twenty minutes passed like that. Marianne apologized and talked about her horse and barely ate and muttered to the Goddess a lot. Hilda and Claude interjected on occasion, but mostly they stared. (Claude had realized by that point that the effort of Not Staring wasn’t worth it.) They stared at Marianne beneath the sun and the hair on her dress and the braid that encircled the back of her head. The blue moons beneath her shadowed eyes. They stared and then she left for her next class when the bell rang and she bowed deeply and said “Thank you very much for having me.” And they didn’t go to their next class.</p><p>Shit, thought Hilda.</p><p>Shit, thought Claude.</p><p>The next day Marianne wasn’t sitting under their tree at lunch, which they both expected but made something akin to horrible disappointment unfurl in the pits of their stomachs anyways. But she wasn’t on the shit bench either. </p><p>“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Claude suggested, and he was right about that. “Fuck that.” Said Hilda, rolling up her sleeves. “She’s earned sitting with us.” And she was right about that too. They split up, Claude covering the right wing and Hilda the left wing, poking around under stairwells and within closets for the closest thing this school had to a depressed Disney Princess. At one point Hilda realized, in the middle of scouring the black box for the slightest hint of brilliant blue or whiff of zoo smells, that she desperately needed to take a piss. And so Hilda headed towards the girl’s bathroom. And so Hilda walked inside. </p><p>Most people, when crying in the public bathroom, do it in a stall. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, the chances of someone walking in on you actively sobbing and thus feeling obligated to comfort you over shit you know will never matter to them are much lower. At worst someone will simply hear you sobbing, prone against the plastic, and that’s a lot easier to ignore. Secondly, as stupid as it may be, the idea that by hiding your misery you are exercising some amount of control over it is a very prevalent one. Crying in a stall simply feels more manageable than crying in the big open emptiness above the sinks, slick with hand sanitizer and your own horrible tears, and even the most emotionally wrecked woman in the world can still convince herself that she is capable of maintaining some authority over her mental breakdown by having it in a tiny space instead of in a large one.</p><p>If someone is crying in the bathroom outside of a stall, it means one of two things: that either no one ever taught them proper bathroom breakdown procedure, or that they are too goddamn far gone to care who sees or to even begin to consider something as nebulous as power in a situation as real and raw as public bathroom sobbing. </p><p>Hilda Valentine Goneril walked in, and Marianne von Edmund was there. Not in a stall, not even at the very last sink. Marianne was sobbing openly, desperately, achingly, like she couldn’t force enough air in her lungs to support the tears she was drowning in, over the first fucking sink. </p><p>“What’s wrong?” Hilda asked, feeling very stupid, and Marianne looked up, all wet and dripping and undone hair and gasped out “I am the worst person in the world.” </p><p>And that was that. </p><p>From that day forwards Claude-and-Hilda became Claude-and-Hilda-and-Marianne. Except Claude-and-Hilda weren’t actually kissing the Marianne part of the equation on a daily basis, and the Marianne part of the equation treated the Claude-and-Hilda part of the equation like spun glass. She touched them barely, if at all, and didn’t that fucking hurt. But at least she was there. </p><p>She was there and she laughed at their dumb jokes just like she said she would. And Claude thought, Shit. And Hilda thought, Shit. </p><p>And so the dynamic shifted on its axis.</p><p>The presence of Marianne, as one would expect, Changed Things. For one, Claude and Hilda made out in public less. It wasn’t out of lack of want, mind you- the two were still wanting. But Marianne. And the hair. And the eyes. And the way she looked the first time they convinced her to skip school with them, muttering prayers to the goddess as she ran, soaked in afternoon sunlight and face wild with fear and exhilaration in equal doses and Claude and Hilda were convinced the sight of her was going to kill them on the spot. So that was less than ideal. </p><p>It was a warm July afternoon, all hot and heavy with steam and dripping laziness, when Hilda, inundated with guilt between perfect kisses, decided to come clean. School was out and yet, somehow, Marianne stayed, scared and shaking and somehow convinced that her presence in itself was bound to kill them all someday, but she stayed, and the lack of academic distraction only made things that much worse. Marianne had stayed, and Hilda, completely overwhelmed by this information, decided to just let it all go.</p><p>Hilda opened her mouth. Hesitated. This was clearly a tricky endeavor and even she, the wildest and darkest mistress of not approaching shit with the tact it probably deserved, knew the situation had earned some sort of measured response. So she needed a strong opener. Okay. Alright. Alright. She could do that. </p><p>“Don’t get mad, okay?” </p><p>Oh great, Hilda thought scathingly. Fucking brilliant.</p><p>Claude blinked and lifted himself off the ground. It was a warm July afternoon and Marianne was in bed with a fever, nervously texting them both pleading for baby names befitting of a newborn foal. It was a day much like a day almost a year ago, only warmer, and tenser, and brighter, the world flush with summertime light. “That’s not very promising.” Claude said, amused. Hilda stuck out her bottom lip at him, fingers entwined with lazy stalks of grass, biting down hard on her words and the way they bubbled up and over and inside of her, hot and sharp and dark. Claude, being a person who noticed things, appropriately, noticed. </p><p>“I need you,” Hilda continued, “not to be mad. Because. I can’t really hide it from you but. When I tell you, you’re going to be disappointed with me. And furious at me. And I hate that. So do your best to hide it, okay?” Claude blinked. Once. Twice. Above them gnarled fingers of tree branches and twisted wood extended towards the sky, grasping, like Hilda, at something essentially out of their reach. Hilda breathes. Slow, steady, an exhale lined with steel and sadness and a need for the pretty boy in front of her to understand.</p><p>“I like Marianne. Like, romantically. I mean.” </p><p>Claude looked at her wordlessly. Hilda took it as an invitation to continue. </p><p>“But that doesn’t mean I like you any less!” Hilda insisted, backbone of steel still present but pregnant with panic. “I still like you and your dumb Star Wars braid and kissing you and calling you my boyfriend in public. And I don’t want to stop kissing you and calling you my boyfriend in public and I don’t want to stop making fun of your dumb Star Wars braid. I like to ignore problems but I like you even more than I like doing that so I promised myself I’d talk to you about it and now I’m doing that. So.” </p><p>Claude continued to look, eyes big, freckles stark and black against his skin. Someone in the distance was playing reggae, and the faint echoes of the sound provided the backdrop for their confrontation. A singular, lonely ant marched across Hilda’s pale knee, looking for the bodies of the dead. The sun glared down at them still, ever uncompromising.</p><p>And then Claude said, breathlessly, invigorated and trembling with excitement and wayward notions like a live fucking wire, “Thank FUCK.” </p><p>“Thank fuck.” Hilda repeated mindlessly, eyes glazed over with shock and even the slightest hint of anger at the idea that all of the groveling she had mentally prepared to execute was for naught. “Why are we thanking fuck? What did fuck ever do for us? Please, inform me, Claude, I’m genuinely confused.” Claude smiled brightly, something in his eyes sparking, bright and fast and swollen with sheer anticipation. “Clearly you haven’t noticed, but you’re not the only one with eyes for Marianne. I was going to confront you about it too, but I was never really quite sure that you actually liked her, so my scheme might have been pointless and not exactly received well.” Hilda gritted her teeth, seemingly about to release herself in a pink ball of pigtails and fury, yelling about the months upon months of fear she’d endured, juggling her relationships precariously with intent to maintain until the end of the fucking world. And then she sighed. And she let it go. </p><p>“Okay. You like Marianne, I like Marianne, and we still like each other so that’s all great. Now that that’s out of the way, what scheme have you cooked up? And does it have anything to do with Marianne eventually motorboating me?” Claude smiled, drunk on power and high-energy notions flickering across mental passageways, neurons lighting and flickering with the rapidity of an active seizure. “It can. And hopefully, it will.” At that Hilda quirked an eyebrow, something tight and heavy in her stomach coming more undone by the second, sending fizzy champagne-bubbles of joy and happiness and the possibility of Marianne’s head on her chest rocketing through her stomach. She motioned at Claude to continue. </p><p>It was a warm July afternoon and the sky was painfully blue, the atmosphere heavy with moisture and teenage sin when Claude von Reigan raised his hands as if a composer and announced his Grand Idea. </p><p>“We date Marianne. The both of us. And we also date each other.”</p><p>After that things fell very quickly into place. </p><p>As it turns out, inviting a third person into their tight interpersonal makeout sessions was a big fucking deal, and should be treated as such. Despite Claude’s desire to subvert expectations and Hilda’s desire to not put a single dollop of effort into anything, the two were united on that front. Essentially Marianne was too important for their usual shit, their layers upon layers of subterfuge and psychological misdirection and personal enigmas wrapped in riddles wrapped in labyrinths. Marianne needed something big and caring and warmly emotional, a proposal of the unquestioningly romantic kind, and Claude and Hilda, also known as Claude-and-Hilda, hopefully soon to be known as Claude-and-Hilda-and-Marianne, lept into action. </p><p>Or, more accurately, they found two big and warm and emotional people that also knew how to bake and begged them to make an official Cake Of Amorous Proposition. </p><p>Dedue Molinaro and Mercedes von Matriz were a little too grown-up for that shit, a little too much adjusted adults functioning in the shells of hopeless teenagers, like something out of a parallel universe where Invasion of the Body Snatchers was intended to be a feel-good movie. Mercedes and Dedue had at least some amount of their shit together, which was better than virtually anyone else. And also, they knew how to bake. So Claude and Hilda went to them. </p><p>“So.” Said Dedue flatly. “If I am not mistaken, you want to bake an enormous cake and proposition Marianne to date you via it? By writing ‘Marianne please date us we think you’re amazing and want partial chicken custody’ on it?” Claude and Hilda nodded identical nods. Mercedes smiled and clapped her hands together, a sharp, proud little noise. “Oh, that’s so sweet! I’d just love to help.” And because Dedue was much nicer than he ought to be and because Mercedes offered to write the inscription with her significantly steadier, smaller hands, he came along for the ride. </p><p>It was a hot July evening a little under a week later and Claude and Hilda were in Mercedes’ beautiful pink kitchen, all linoleum and stainless steel and the smell of frosting and sugar. Mercedes hummed as she worked, hands buried in chocolate, as Dedue stirred the batter. Hilda and Claude waited on the couch. Neither offered to help, an action (or rather, inaction) definitely motivated by laziness but in the end rather reasonable if the cake was to turn out edible. They tried making out to pass the time, but stopped when the nervous clatter of Hilda’s teeth began to give Claude the impression he was locking lips with a pinball machine. So instead they waited on a pristine white sofa, Claude surfing over a copy of Sports Illustrated while privately attempting to count every single basketball that appeared, Hilda staring at her nails with the single-minded fixation of an amateur serial killer just invited to babysit someone’s toddler over a weekend. They waited until Mercedes and Dedue emerged from the kitchen, slick with sweat and baking soda, distant eyes like reminiscing veterans. “All right,” Mercedes said cheerfully, “We’ve got about half an hour. So. Tell us about Marianne!”</p><p>Hilda spoke first, eagerly, and then Claude was talking, the two of them tripping and winding together, words mixing and melting and coalescing, warped with pride, heavy with love. </p><p>“She’s so smart, like, way smarter than me-“</p><p>“I think she might be an actual witch, she sends me pictures of her cats taking baths in a fucking cauldron sometimes-“</p><p>“She’s so pretty and her braids are so intricate, she did my hair once and I nearly passed out because of the feeling of her nails on my skin-“ </p><p>“She names all of her horses Sylvester, it’s amazing, not even Sylvester One or Two or anything just an endless sea of identical Sylvesters-“</p><p>“When she laughs I want to make everyone else shut up and listen-“ </p><p>“When she smiles it’s, holy shit, I can’t even begin to-“ </p><p>“-and she doesn’t like herself, doesn’t think she deserves us, thinks she carries bad luck and that she’s an intruder in our lives and it’s just-“ </p><p>“-I love our lives with her in it. I really do.” </p><p>Dedue and Mercedes, mercifully, did not say anything in response to their continuous word vomit. Which was just as well. It wasn’t for them, anyways. Eventually, Hilda and Claude waddled out of Mercedes’ house, balancing a gigantic, pristine cake between the two of them, laughing and desperate, so close to something so breakable and beautiful that they both wanted taped and tied to them forever, to cherish and for use. Mercedes watched them go from the doorway, Dedue waiting behind her. “Do you think,” she said, still smiling, eyes open and wanting for nothing, something like satisfaction dripping from her open pores, “That they’ll figure it out?” Dedue nodded in assent. “That’s what I thought,” Mercedes intoned, and then went inside to clean up. </p><p>It was a hot July evening and Hilda and Claude were laughing, punch drunk, babbling beneath their mountain of cake pointless little scraps and snippets of love, heat on their backs, fading blue sky watching in silence. How Claude looked like one of those old Greek statues in the light of dusk, how Marianne danced for them one perfect day a month before with her eyes closed and her lips in a desperate part, how Hilda kissed Claude in the street just to smear off lipgloss she wasn’t feeling anymore, how beautiful it was, how precious it was to be young. And how love didn’t hurt like everyone said it would, not their kind, the best kind, and how it felt like being full, the overflow of words from mouths and water from eyes and feeling from extended digits. And they were still laughing when they entered Marianne’s house, her father out working, her obediently waiting in the kitchen for the surprise they had called her to announce was in store ten minutes earlier. </p><p>And they walked into the kitchen, and Marianne was wearing an Emily the Strange graphic tee and white shorts and her hair was undone and the sight of her in the kitchen, sloppy and leaning against the countertop, nearly made Claude drop the cake altogether. </p><p>“Surprise!” Hilda yelled hoarsely, throat dry with a faint rasp of hysteria and the presence of love. “Surprise!” Claude echoed, just a second two late, and braced himself against the kitchen island as Hilda set the cake down, as delicate as anything, as her arms shook with suppressed glee. And Marianne, who was already crying, hesitantly wiped away her tears and read the flowering inscription in Mercedes’ careful cursive, and then she started crying all over again. And then she lunged for them, catching them both in her open arms, clinging like a dying woman to life. And she held them. And she breathed them in. And something inside of her began to overflow. </p><p>“I don’t deserve this,” she coughed out, one hand entangled in Claude’s hair, the other vicelike around Hilda’s wrist. “You love each other so much. How can I fit? How can I help? I only ever knew how to hurt things.”</p><p>“Marianne.” Hilda said sternly, in between desperate coughs and hiccups, because somewhere along the line she and Claude had begun crying too, “You have never hurt a damn thing in your life. Please date us. I have so many good chicken names stored up.” “Rover.” Claude began to recite, arms full of Hilda and Marianne and their candy colored hair, “Hunter, Dasher, Marmalade-“ And then he dissolved into laughter and tears. Marianne sniffed. Hilda choked on air and picked up the baton. “Those names fucking suck. Victory. Donut Hole. Armageddon Machine. Those are my candidates, by the way, and they’re great and totally own. I love you. I love you.” </p><p>And then Hilda fell, and then Claude fell, and then Marianne fell too, a deck of cards collapsing, magnets and leeches and limpets never letting go. And it was a hot July evening, and there was time to cry then, and then after the crying and the hugging and the kisses that were softer than breath, there would be eating of cake with bare and trembling hands, and benedictions, and love. And sleepy mornings and heat and laughter and chickens all named Marmaggedon, a deeply clever fusion of Hilda and Claude’s best potential chicken names. Except they weren’t and wouldn’t be Hilda and Claude, or Hilda-and-Claude. It was a hot July evening and they were Hilda-and-Claude-and-Marianne. </p><p>And they were held.</p>
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